Beyond Organic Local Farm Products

Self Sufficient Stairs!

Well, George is at it again. Or more aptly, I’ve put him up to it again. Improving the house, that is.

Inside the home, we have done an amazing amount of work to improve the place in one short year. One eyesore that remained was a set of carpeted stairs. This staircase was the only carpeted area in the house, and the carpet was trashed. The color wasn’t great to begin with, and there were pet stains to boot.

Well, we lived with this carpeted staircase for a year. Every time we had a party, I cringed at the thought of people seeing the stained stairs. But we had too many other things to do, until now….

Flooring From Friends' House

The itch to improve the stairs began when friends of our bought a new house. They were replacing all of their carpet, and some hardwood, with new hardwood floors. We went over to help them, and I participated in de-carpeting some stairs. It was surprisingly easy! Of course, the destruction part always is. They also gave us some hardwood that they ripped up because they were replacing it. The thought was that perhaps we could use it on our stairs. So now that I had this carpet removal experience, and we had a pile of wood to potentially use on the stairs, George’s new task was born.

Ripping Up Carpet

Somehow he got roped into being the one that removes the old carpet. Fortunately it was just a staircase, so he got it done in two stints of about two hours apiece over consecutive nights. We made sure to schedule the work so that once everything was ripped up, it would be garbage night and everything could just go to the curb. Here’s the pile of nastiness:

Carpet Garbage Pile

Now we have a set of wood stairs, right?! Unfortunately we can’t really leave it that way. And, it doesn’t look like the donated hardwood will work. See that lip on every stair tread? That requires a certain piece to go over it, and we don’t think we got enough of that from our friends. So we’ll likely have to buy new wood for the stairs. So that part of being frugal didn’t work out. George has bravely enlisted to install the flooring, though, so this is still a project of self-sufficiency! Our next step is to get flooring, and look forward to more posts on the stairs project!